MyDogHsFleas
Premium
join:2007-08-15
Austin, TX
 ·AT&T U-Verse
 ·AT&T Southwest
1 edit | reply to Boogeyman
said by Boogeyman  :Its well established that most BBR users know that user accounts and passwords are good ideas. But I'm talking about Joe Average. Its been my experience that even when average users set up user accounts, they are rarely used correctly. While visiting family a while back, I went to use my grandfathers pc and he just old me his account password. My aunt and 2 cousins also had thier own accounts, but everyone knew my grandfathers (admin) password and whenever thier account wouldnt let them do something, they logged into his and did it. The same situation goes on at my brothers house (who isnt related to the other family). I know its not everyone, but its been more common in my experience than the people who use them correctly. Yep, I've seen exactly the same thing. IMHO personal computers were a huge mistake. Making consumers the bit-level sysadmins of the most complex piece of gear in their house is really a terrible idea. See what we ended up with? Piracy, spam, phishing, botnets, DOS attacks, identity theft, fraud, exposing kids to porn, and the ability to abuse people anonymously. Great stuff, there.
We seem to be moving back towards a much more reasonable "cloud computing" architecture, where the PCs are really just nice powerful user interface boxes, and all the logic and data is outside of the PC, in "the cloud". See Google Apps for example. Now if they could just get away from the idea that users manage their own PCs, and start selling "cloud appliance" computers that are non-configurable by the consumer, maybe we'll see less of this.
I know they probably wont ever give an ad revenue discount, but my point was that if they did, it would give them a huge PR boost and make many people WANT to opt in to the service. It wouldnt even need to be monetary discount. For the people who actually use thier ISP email/webspace, a bump in storage would be enough for a lot of people to want to opt in. See, if they bundled it with something users wanted, most everyday users would opt in if they judged the pro to be better than the con.
Well, I suppose this might be attractive to you, and maybe a small circle of people. But I think the average person would say "huh? you want me to do what for what?" The customer service calls cost alone would probably piss away any revenue or good will this might create.
People are used to the reduced-cost-stuff-for-advertising business model. See radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, and even Google. A new business model that says "we'll give you XYZ for accepting advertising" I just can't see taking hold. |
